Across North America: Reginald Arthur Lorrain and the Making of a Missionary

Abstract

This article examines the North American years (1899–1902) of Reginald Arthur Lorrain, an Englishman who subsequently served for several decades as a Christian missionary among the Maras of the Indo-Burma borderland. Drawing on Lorrain’s unpublished personal diary, the study traces his passage through the agricultural, industrial, and itinerant-labour economies of Manitoba, Ontario, and the southern United States, and argues that the hardship, physical risk, and social marginality he encountered there constituted a formative, if unintended, preparation for his later missionary vocation.

Read against the ideological backdrop of late-Victorian Muscular Christianity and imperial culture, Lorrain’s North American experience is used here to illuminate the broader relationship between secular labour emigration, character formation, and missionary calling in this period. Conceptually, the analysis draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, Raymond Williams’s structure of feeling, and Victor Turner’s model of ritual transition to explain how this unremarkable labour migration came to function as vocational preparation. The article also considers how far ordinary Britons were influenced by imperial ideas, placing Lorrain closer to Bernard Porter’s view that such influence was often unconscious than to John MacKenzie’s argument that imperial ideas were widely and consciously accepted.